Opinion | Why Yoshihide Suga will struggle to sustain Japan’s balance between China and the US

Shinzo Abe’s unexpected resignation as Japanese prime minister last month for health reasons has raised many questions about the legacy of the country’s longest-serving premier. One is whether his successor, Yoshihide Suga, will be able to continue Abe’s geopolitical balancing act as tensions between China and the United States continue to escalate.

Abe went out of his way to befriend US President Donald Trump, even as Trump claimed US-Japanese trade was “not fair and open” and demanded Japan quadruple its contribution to the cost of keeping US troops in the country. He further pleased the Trump administration by quietly banning the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from taking part in building Japan’s 5G network.

At the same time, Abe also cultivated ties with President Xi Jinping and made a diplomatic ice-breaking trip to Beijing in October 2018 for the first Sino-Japanese summit in seven years. With US-China relations in free fall, Xi seized Abe’s olive branch and planned a state visit to Japan this April, which would have been the first by a Chinese leader since 2008. The visit has been postponed indefinitely because of Covid-19.

Suga will find it increasingly difficult to avoid taking sides in the intensifying US-China conflict. In the short term, he will have to make a decision on Xi’s postponed state visit. Opposition to the visit runs high within Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party, owing to Beijing’s recent imposition of a harsh national security law in Hong Kong. A made-for-TV state visit to Japan would be a huge win for Xi, who is eager to show that the Trump administration’s containment of China is failing.

Chinese pressure to reschedule the visit will put Suga in a bind. Acceding to Beijing’s wishes would cost him political capital at home, but scrapping the visit would humiliate Xi and hurt Sino-Japanese ties.